Michael Fay Dr. Michael Fay is a conservationist with the Science and Exploration Program at the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society and a Conservation Fellow at the National Geographic Society. He has spent his life as a naturalist--from the Sierra Nevada mountains and the Maine woods as a boy, Alaska and Central America in college, to the depths of the African forest today. After receiving his Bachelor of Science degree in 1978 from the University of Arizona, Dr. Fay spent six years in the Peace Corps as a botanist in the national parks of Tunisia and the savannas of the Central African Republic. In 1984, he went to work at the Missouri Botanical Garden. A floristics study of a mountain range on Sudan's western border eventually led to a Ph.D. on the western lowland gorilla from the Missouri Botanical Garden under Dr. Peter Raven. It was at this time that Dr. Fay first entered the forests of central Africa where he still works. Dr. Fay's doctoral work was curtailed several times (graduated 1997) while he surveyed large forest blocks and worked to create and manage the Dzanga-Sangha and Nouabale-Ndoki parks in the Central African Republic and the Congo. In 1996, he flew a small airplane low over the forests of Congo and Gabon and observed a vast, intact forest corridor that spanned the two countries, from the Oubangui River to the Atlantic Ocean. In 1997, he decided to walk the entire corridor -- over 1,200 miles -- systematically surveying trees, wildlife, and human impacts on uninhabited forest areas, for a project he developed called the Megatransect. This voyage resulted in the creation of a network of 13 national parks in Gabon and the Congo Basin Forest Partnership after Fay took a walk in the woods with Colin Powell. For the past year, Dr. Fay has been flying a 60,000 mile voyage around the African continent, evaluating the human footprint. During this journey, Fay systematically took over 100,000 high resolution vertical photographs which have given him a unique perspective on the relationship between man and his habitat on the continent. He hopes that this work will result in significant changes in the way the U.S. Government regards and funds international natural resource management worldwide, particularly in Africa.